Three-dimension (3D) image capture and display technologies have been widely used in various applications, such as 3D movies, object recognition, etc. Stereoscopic images captured by a stereo camera may include a pair of left image and right image taken at two view points at a same scene. A depth map may be extracted from a pair of images based on their image disparity. The depth map is an image or image channel that contains information relating to the distance of the surfaces of the objects from a viewpoint. A depth map may be a grey scale image. The intensity of a pixel in the depth map indicates its distance from the camera. The pixel representing the largest image disparity may indicate the minimum measurable distance from the camera.
When generating a depth map, existing implementations often search for matching pixels in a stereo image pair and calculate their parallax by a fixed-scale processing. However, once the parameters of stereo camera are fixed and the resolution of the depth map is determined, the minimum measurable distance in the generated depth map cannot be changed and the measurement resolution of the depth map is fixed.
The disclosed method and system are directed to solve one or more problems set forth above and other problems.